It started six months ago, six months after we buried Otis—my husband, my partner of forty-two years, the man I built everything with: the house, the memories, our entire life. Otis died of a massive heart attack. One morning, he was sitting across from me at the kitchen table, smiling as he talked about planting new roses in the garden, and by that afternoon he was gone. He left so fast I never even got a proper goodbye. I only managed to hold his hand in the hospital while the doctors shook their heads with grave, helpless expressions.
After the funeral, I was alone in the house Otis and I bought thirty years earlier, back when we were young and still foolish enough to believe hard work guaranteed safety. We paid every cent with our own labor. Otis was a mechanic. I sewed clothes for the neighbors. Between the two of us, we scraped together the $20,000 down payment little by little, and then we paid for fifteen years, month after month, never missing a single payment. That house was ours. It was mine.
Marcus started visiting every week after his father died. At first, I told myself it was love, concern, duty. He brought his wife, Vanessa—a slender woman with a calculating gaze and a smile that never reached her eyes. She rarely looked me in the face when she spoke. Her attention stayed glued to her phone, her sighs sharp with impatience, like being in my home was some kind of punishment.
“Mama, you can’t stay here alone,” Marcus would say, leaning into the tone of a worried son. “This house is too big for you. What if you fall? What if you get sick in the middle of the night and no one hears you?”
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